Live Matter: Contemporary Artists on Plants in Practice

Piero Golia Italian-born, Los Angeles–based artist Piero Golia (b. 1974, Italy) is a sculptor of situations. His Works—which at times take physical form, often at an architectural scale, and at others are Immaterial—are statements aimed at expanding the possibilities of art. His practice is heterogeneous and unpredictable, employing diverse mediums and methods to spark chain reactions that, even when they leave no objects or images behind, have the capacity to alter our perception. As a young man in Naples, Golia studied chemical engineering, learning about the transformation of raw materials into powerful energy sources. Such a concept captures a crucial aspect of his artistic approach, in which he takes preexisting objects from lived reality as the starting point for a set of actions that unfold, displacing initial meanings and functions.

Drawn to the varied cultural associations of Los Angeles, where he has lived and worked since 2002, Golia has produced a vast number of artworks inspired by or situated in the city itself. For example, Luminous Sphere (2010), a five-foot-tall orb installed on the roof of West Hollywood’s Standard Hotel, is only illuminated when the artist is in town; like a sacred presence expressed in LA vernacular, the mysterious cipher awaits projection of meaning from the casual passerby unaware of what drives its pattern of illumination. “It’s a form open to urban legend,” the artist muses. Golia frequently operates outside the traditional parameters of studio practice, often producing situations that aim to elicit an intuitive and spontaneous response from his viewers through theatrical, conceptual gestures. In 2013 he opened Chalet, an underground Hollywood speakeasy (later restaged as Chalet Dallas at the Nasher Sculpture Center in 2015) that was conceived as a space combining architecture, entertainment, and art.

Since 2017 Golia has developed new projects that explore social networks and retain traces of prior circumstances. At Art Basel in 2017, he realized the kinetic sculpture The Painter, which featured a robot programmed to paint abstract geometric forms onto eight large canvases whenever movement In the exhibition space was detected. The resulting Basel Paintings (2017) retain visual evidence of the process of their own making.

Photo: courtesy of the artist.

Natalie Jeremijenko (b. 1966, Australia) is an artist and engineer. She is an Officer of the Order of Australia awarded in 2018 by the governor-general on behalf of Queen Elizabeth II for “distinguished service to the arts, and to higher education as an academic, through pioneering contributions to architecture, technology, the sciences, and engineering, and to rural and urban design.” Jeremijenko directs the Environmental Health Clinic International, a network of colaboratories addressing the external determinants of health. She is founding Director of Design Engineering at the Museum of Natural Futures, an initiative to develop shared infrastructures that improve human and environmental health. She is also associate professor in the Visual Art Department at NYU.

Jeremijenko’s artworks have been included in two Whitney Biennials, MOMA, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Reina Sofia museum, MACBA, and CCCB among many others. Her public art installations include “Tree Logic” at MASSMoCA; “OneTrees” in the San Francisco Bay Area; “TREExOFFICEs” in London and Berlin; Amphibious Architecture in East River, NYC, and Derwent River Tasmania; and “Urban Space Station (USS)” at Emscherkunst in Dortmund. Solo retrospectives have been produced by the Neuberger Museum of Art and the Cummings Center for the Arts at Connecticut College.

Photo: courtesy of the artist.

Pieranna Cavalchini, Tom and Lisa Blumenthal Curator of Contemporary Art

Photo: courtesy of the artist.

Charles Waldheim is an American Canadian architect and urbanist based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Waldheim’s research examines the relationships between landscape, ecology, and contemporary urbanism. Waldheim is the author, editor, or co-editor of numerous publications on these topics, including Landscape as Urbanism: A General Theory and The Landscape Urbanism Reader. Waldheim developed the theory of landscape urbanism in response to the industrial economies and emergent ecologies of the American city. On this topic, he curates Harvard GSD’s Future of the American City platform.

Waldheim is John E. Irving Professor of Landscape Architecture at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design where he directs the school’s Office for Urbanization. He also serves as Ruettgers Curator of Landscape at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston where he convenes The Larger (Landscape) Conversation and most recently co-curated Presence of Plants in Contemporary Art. Waldheim is the recipient of the Rome Prize Fellowship from the American Academy in Rome, the Visiting Scholar Research Fellowship at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, the Sanders Fellowship at the University of Michigan, and the Cullinan Chair at Rice University. He has been visiting scholar at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London and the Bauhaus Foundation in Dessau, Germany.

Photo: courtesy of the artist.